RIM Might License BlackBerry 10, But What Hardware Vendors Want It?

Your next BlackBerry could be from Samsung. Photo: Jon Synder/Wired

RIM is facing an uphill battle as the company attempts to dig itself out of its current situation. With BB10 postponed until the first quarter of 2013 and the company bleeding money, CEO Thorsten Heins is looking towards desperate measures.

How desperate?

RIM is investigating licensing BB10 to third-party hardware makers, Heins told The Telegraph in an interview. “You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform,” Heins said.

The CEO wouldn’t get into details about the potential business plan, but he said that the company is working with its financial planners to see if it is financially viable. But is this a plan that RIM can actually implement?

“RIM’s talked about licensing, there’s no secret they’re doing that. The real question is who are they going to license to?” analyst Ken Dulaney of Gartner told Wired. If dominant phone manufacturers like Samsung and HTC are not interested, there are other options. Dulaney said: “It’s going to be secondary players potentially or maybe a large player that’s looking for some niche market.”

While licensing with large hardware makers, and in markets like the United States, might not pan out for the Waterloo-based company, the company’s international market could benefit. Dulaney told Wired, “Markets, like international, where [RIM has] been strong, they don’t necessarily want to make devices and they may want lower-cost devices.” That’s something that licensing BB10 could help achieve.

But, without more concrete information about its future plans, it’s difficult to parse how RIM could push its licensing deals.

Regardless of the company’s current financial difficulties or its pending difficulties with hardware partners, Heins is still dedicated to the current BlackBerry customers: “Either we do it ourselves or we do it with a partner. But we will not abandon the subscriber base.”